Labour once more

Author’s note: This article was originally presented as a teach-in on the history of the Labour Left[1] given to the Platypus chapter at the London School of Economics on December 5, 2019, a week before the UK election, in which Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won a landslide majority and inflicted a resounding defeat on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The argument follows that of my article “‘Last illusions’: The Labour Party and the Left,” published in issue 97 of this review in 2017.[2] Not much has changed since 2017 nor since the election results were announced in December.

Foreword: after the election

IN THE BUBBLE OF
ELITE UNIVERSITIES and among circles of urban young professionals, where
Leftists dedicated many hours to door-knocking for Labour, a false optimism
about Labour’s chances was betrayed by the insistence that anyone who did not
join in it was morally suspect. Gone were questions about socialism and how
Labour was to be “transformed.” Meanwhile, Corbynism had only continued Blair’s
yuppification of the Labour party. The Corbynistas were in for a shock.[3]
“Look at all those white people!” said a woman next to me, with palpable
disdain, at a watching party as the result came in from Blythe Valley. She’s
clearly never been to the northeast. Totally disoriented by Brexit, the Left — which
had bet everything on Corbynism — became the last defenders of neoliberalism.

The Conservative
victory has exacerbated the pre-existing division on the Left between those who
favored an orientation towards pro-Brexit voters in the post-industrial
“heartlands” and those who favored an orientation towards the “progressive”
alliance of students, ethnic minorities and precarious urban workers. Rather
than raising fundamental questions for the Left, the defeat allows both sides
to double down on their Labour orientation, arguing about what could have been.
Both sides call it “Labour’s loss,” avoiding mention of the Conservatives’
victory. Both sides propound the myth that a Labour government would be somehow
closer to “socialism” than a Conservative one.

Those who backed a pro-Brexit orientation to revive a “Left populism”
are right to point out the working class’s revolt against Labour, but they are
ambivalent about it, fumbling around with a pre-neoliberal vision of social democracy,
which is never going to return. This orientation obscures the question of
post-neoliberalism, as its proponents imagine a simple reversal of
neoliberalism at the level of policy backed by restored party institutions. The
real crisis of post-war social democracy and the emergence of the New Left is
avoided. “Working-class independence” is understood simply sociologically, as against
the “professional managerial class” they chide. The Marxist concept of
political independence is avoided.

Those on the “far Left” who have been committed for four years to
justifying support for Corbyn and “socialism” now claim they knew it was never
going to work, falling back on their old demands for extra-parliamentary street
protests. Lindsey German and Tariq Ali will try to revive the Stop the War
Coalition, but capitalist politics is not about to return to 2003. Socialist
Appeal/IMT, which campaigned for a Labour government “with socialist policies,”
told their activists, “Don’t believe the polls or pessimists — we can win!”[4]
Now they are reorienting towards global protests with their Marxist Student Federation
Conference theme “World in Revolt” (last year it was “The fight for socialism
today”). But a sharp turn may throw off many of those politicized by Corbynism,
who will be happy to settle for Rebecca Long-Bailey or Clive Lewis (or even Keir
Starmer) and depoliticized disgust with “evil Tories” — that thorny thought taboo
which the Left has taught to another generation. The symbiotic relation between the Labour Left and Right rolls on.

***

Symbiotic relationship

The near universal support for Corbyn’s Labour party from the Left has
been the latest chapter of its decomposition, in which the Left has adapted itself to changes
within capitalism, claiming out of despair that each new thing is the chance in
the fight for socialism, and then, when it turns out not to be so, supporting
it anyway. The Left has become conservative, opposing changes in capitalism,
thus avoiding the question of how such changes point to new possibilities. Millennials
who joined ostensibly revolutionary organizations in the anti-war or
anti-austerity protests all settled for Corbyn’s “kinder, gentler politics.”

I concluded my 2017 article
on Labour and the Left with Hillel Ticktin’s assessment of Corbyn and
McDonnell: “While Corbyn and McDonnell both talk about socialism, they are not
even very radical, let alone socialist.”[5]
The Labour Right, however, stigmatized McDonell’s meager policies as “socialist.”
Ticktin noted that this “shows the nature of rightwing Labour — it does not
understand the system it is supporting.” I agreed, adding: “What does it show
about the Left today that they share the same fantasy?” That is, the fantasy
that this has anything to do with socialism, a term that in 2016 was really
just a label for being passionately anti-Trump or anti-Brexit.

A week before the
election, even such fantastical talk of socialism has been dropped in favor of
just defending the NHS and stopping Brexit, for which perhaps millions of
working-class voters will abandon Labour for the Tories — indeed, many already
have.

The attempts to
“transform” the Labour party have failed. There have been at least three
different splits from Momentum, going back to early 2017. All of these have
fizzled out, yet their disgruntled leaders will still support Labour. The idea
that it wasn’t about supporting Corbyn but “transforming Labour” turns out to have
been an enabling myth.

Remember when
Leftists said that backing the Labour Left to revive social democracy was a
dead end? Like when Mark Fisher wrote in 2009 that “capitalist realism need not
be neoliberal… capitalism could revert to a model of social democracy… Without
a credible and coherent alternative to capitalism, capitalist realism will
continue”?[6]
Or when the Sparticist League argued that there was “no choice” between Tony
Benn and Neil Kinnock in 1988?[7]
But once the “fight in the Labour party” was on in 2016, everyone from Fisher
to the Sparts supported Corbyn, the former believing that we were riding a
“wave… towards post-capitalism”[8]
and the latter declaring Labour’s internal disputes to be a “class war.”[9]

The Left has been
caught up in what the Sparticist League described acutely in 1988 as a
“symbiotic relationship”:

“Benn’s campaign has been portrayed by the bourgeois press and most of the ostensibly socialist left as a David and Goliath battle for the ‘socialist soul’ of the party against Kinnock/Hattersley’s overt scabbing and ‘new realism.’ But the Labour ‘lefts’ indulgence in the timeworn reformist rhetoric of the parliamentary road to democratic socialism, ‘unilateralism,’ non-alignment, disarmament and nationalist ‘Little England’ protectionism is no alternative to Kinnock’s more reactionary agenda for class peace in Thatcher’s Britain. Indeed, this contest reflects the classic and historic symbiotic relation between the Labour ‘left’ and right that has maintained the party for decades as the primary obstacle to proletarian revolution on these isles.”[10]

Since 2015, Corbyn’s
leadership of the Labour party has been presented in similar histrionic terms,
“a David and Goliath battle for
the ‘socialist soul’ of the party.” The illusion of
fighting the Right, whether within the Labour party, or supporting the Labour
party in whatever form just to “kick the Tories out,” has replenished the
Labour party with activists for generations and kept the Left chained to its
tail.

What is this
symbiotic relationship, and how has it come about?

From Chartism to Labourism: “progressive” Bonapartism

The appearance of the class struggle in politics in the 1830s and 40s
was a symptom of the crisis of bourgeois society — not its cause. Marx took
“class” to be a historical and not a sociological category. The task of the
proletariat, he wrote, was to abolish itself, not to realize itself.

Chartism and the
revolutions of 1848 failed to lead to the “social republic.” Instead, a new
form of state arose over society, wielding welfare programs and police forces
to manage the contradictions. This was clearly expressed in the election and then
coup of Louis Bonaparte, with mass popular support from all sections of
society. Under these conditions of Bonapartism, Marx recognized in a new way both
the political independence of the working class from bourgeois liberals and
radicals and the dictatorship of the proletariat as necessary political forms
for overcoming the state and capitalism.

This insight was the
foundation for the Social Democratic parties of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, which sought, through the Second International, to build the
independent working-class force for an international revolution.

Bonapartism has been
the condition of capitalist politics ever since. It was exemplified in Britain
by Palmerston and Gladstone’s Liberal reform administrations and Disraeli’s
“One Nation” Conservatism. The politics of the representation of labor in
Britain from the post-Chartist period onwards was a form of adaptation to the
prevailing state capitalism, unlike the socialists’ attempts to point beyond
such conditions.

The organized trade
union movement mostly sought parliamentary representation through the Liberal
Party. This was embodied by A. J. Mundella, the first representative of labor
elected to parliament in 1868, a year after the ’67 reform act gave some
working-class people the vote and the same year that the Trade Union Congress (TUC)
was founded. Mundella had been a Chartist and poet, and at 15 heard his ballads
sung in Chartist meetings. He went on to become a successful capitalist and
partner in a large manufacturing firm. As the representative of labor, he was
elected on the Liberal Party ticket and served in numerous administrations,
helping to pass the trade union reforms of the early 1870s.

The politics of Bonapartism are captured well by a cartoon from 1871.
The Liberal Gladstone stands on a copy of the “Manifesto of the Birmingham
Liberals,” while a worker, tools at the ready, points at the manifesto,
demanding that Gladstone “stand and deliver!” The worker is demanding his
bourgeois right to the value of his labor. But, as Marx said, “Between equal
rights force decides.”[11]
A zombie-like policeman is coming down towards them, baton at the ready.
Someone—it’s not clear who—is going to get their head smashed in. In the
background hang three gold balls, symbol of the pawnshop, indicating the
lingering threat of unemployment that underpins this political dynamic.

The Labour Party that
emerged in 1906 continued this Bonapartist politics of the Liberal
representation of labor in the capitalist state, against attempts to establish
a socialist party seeking to organise the working class independently to go
beyond capitalism. As Theodore Rothstein wrote in From Chartism to
Labourism:

“After 1848 a new chapter is opened in the social history of England — not
a chapter perhaps, but a whole volume — and this new volume has an entirely
different content, and is permeated with quite a different spirit. If on the
Continent of Europe the year 1848 marked the appearance of the
proletariat upon the stage, henceforth fighting for its emancipation, in
England it marked the moment of the retreat of the proletariat,
henceforth tied body and soul to the triumphal chariot of the bourgeoisie,
which it is dragging along to this day.”[12]

Attempts to break the
British working class away from Liberal labor representation to a mass
socialist party failed. In the 1880s, three very different socialist groups
emerged. Henry Hyndman founded the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1881.
A somewhat irreverent follower of Marx, he hoped to establish a mass socialist
party on the model of the Second International. In 1884, economists Sidney and
Beatrice Webb founded the Fabian Society, committed to Bonapartist welfare and
social reform on the Bismarckian model. In 1889, Keir Hardie formed the
Independent Labour Party (ILP), championing parliamentary representation of
labor separate from the Liberals, at least formally. All three groups tried to
gain working class support through the TUC. In the 1880s and 90s, the efforts
of the SDF to push for an independent socialist class politics were repeatedly blocked
by the trade unions, and their attempts to unify with the ILP failed.

The Liberal Party
welcomed the new Labour representatives, whose votes supported the Liberal
governments, and stood aside in many seats to let the Labour candidate win. Sometimes
a clash would emerge between an independent labor candidate and the Liberal
labor candidate. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was formed in 1900
to avoid this happening and ensure the greatest number of representatives of labor
in Parliament. Again, the three socialist groups joined, but the efforts of the
SDF to push for an independent class politics and socialist goal were rejected,
and they walked out a year later.

In 1906, 29 LRC
candidates were returned, a majority with the support of the Liberals, who, for
example, stood aside for Keir Hardie to win his seat. Ramsay MacDonald, future
Labour prime minister and theoretician of the ILP, was also elected that year.
He summarized the group’s politics succinctly: “The
watchword of socialism is not class consciousness but community consciousness.”[13] This “community consciousness” was a
parallel to Disraeli’s “one nation” Conservatism: Bonapartism.

The SDF continued
unsuccessfully to try to build a British socialist party in the Second
International, opposing the Labour Party and the Liberals. The commitment of the
newly christened Labour Party to Liberal social reforms was embodied in the 1910
general elections. Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” — was this echoed by McDonnell’s
“People’s Chancellor”? — promised large social welfare reforms, but it was
blocked by the House of Lords. A “People vs Parliament” election — as
Boris Johnson has branded that of 2019 —
was called to push through the reforms. The
Liberals won with Labour’s support.

A famous poster from
this election is often used on the Left as an example of Labour’s early
radicalism. It shows men using battering rams to open the House of Lords. The
caption reads, “Labour clears the way.” Labour clears the way — for what? For
Socialism? No. For the Liberal reforms, which were blocked by the House of
Lords. It is literally Labour being used as a battering ram by the Liberals. This
is a good example of the “progressive” capitalist politics that the Left has
been supporting since the 1930s — if not the 1910s. It was exemplified in the
U.S. by Teddy Roosevelt’s “progressivism.”[14]

The SDF cautioned its supporters against any illusions in the supposed “lesser
evil” of the Liberal government supported by the Labour party. Dora Montefiore
wrote in Justice:

“[A]s far as our side was concerned the election has been fought absolutely and purely on Socialist teachings; the Budget has been attacked and riddled and ridiculed as far as the plea of its being a “poor man’s Budget” is concerned. There has been no truckling to any “restricting the veto of the Lords”; but we have pointed again and again to our programme, which demands the “abolition of the House of Lords.” Whilst detailing the few immediate palliatives which must be conceded in order to mitigate the terrible sufferings entailed by capitalism, we have spoken ever of Revolutionary Socialism as being the only hope of the workers; and they have responded with a cheer for Social Democracy.”[15]

In 1911, some sections of the ILP, unhappy with
the direction of the LRC in supporting the Liberals, broke away and joined the
SDF, becoming the British Socialist Party (BSP).

Lenin and Labour

The international socialist movement came into crisis during WWI as the German
socialists voted to support war credits. The Labour Party duly voted through
the war budgets for the Liberal government.[16]
The BSP also split, with Hyndman leading out a pro-war faction. The
revolutionary opportunity posed by this crisis led to the Russian revolution
and the formation of communist parties out of the remnants of former socialist
parties. In Britain, the Communist Party was formed by the BSP and several
smaller groups. Arguments immediately broke out within the CPGB as to how to
orient towards the Labour Party — how to win the working class away from Labour.

This debate
occasioned Lenin’s famous speech on affiliation with the Labour Party in 1920,
which has been much abused by Leftists today seeking justification for their
activity in Labour. The Labour Party at the time was still a very loose organization
to which other parties (such as the BSP) could affiliate and had. This was a
unique situation, in which the CPGB could attempt to affiliate and publicly
agitate against the Labour leadership.

Lenin criticized the
view that Labour was the “political expression” of the working class:

“The concept ‘political expression’ of the trade union movement, is erroneous. Of course, most of the Labour Party’s members are workingmen. However, whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat. Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers”.[17]

Here Lenin is drawing
on Marx’s lessons of 1848: the necessity of political independence of the
working class for socialism, as opposed to trade unionism and Bonapartist
reforms within capitalism. Further, following Marx, Lenin assumes that it is
the goal of socialism that constitutes the proletariat politically as such;
otherwise, the working class is just another racket within capitalism.
Similarly, when Eduard Bernstein, inspired by the British trade union movement,
advanced his “revisionist” socialism in Germany, saying, “the movement is
everything, the goal is nothing,” Rosa Luxemburg upheld the Marxist view that,

“[T]he final goal of socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the Social-Democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for the suppression of this order.”[18]

Given the open nature of the Labour Party, Lenin called for the CPGB to
affiliate but to maintain complete freedom of press and organization and to
begin agitating against the Labour leadership. When Sylvia Pankhurst responded
that Labour would immediately kick them out if they did so, Lenin responded
that that would be excellent, as it would publicly demonstrate to the working
class that the Labour party “is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which
exists to systematically dupe the workers.” It was on that basis that
affiliation with the Labour Party was called for — to support it like a rope
supports a hanged man.

In the end, Labour
did not accept CPGB affiliation, and when CPGB members joined individually,
they were witch-hunted out over the 1920s.[19]
The window of opportunity quickly closed as the German revolution failed, Lenin
died and Stalinism began to take its hold on the Third International, and, at
the same time, the Labour Party became the official opposition and then joint
governing party with the Liberals, becoming a more tightly controlled organization
and squeezing out the efforts of the early CPGB to lead the working class away
from Labourism. In the absence of an independent Socialist or Communist party,
in the absence of an International and in the absence of the working-class
radicalism that followed WWI, quoting Lenin to justify working with Labour
reversed the who/whom question Lenin posed. Rather than the Left using the
Labour Party, the Labour Party has used the Left ever since.

The Stalinist CPGB,
through all its various zigzags, accommodated to tacit support for Labour
through its so-called “British road to socialism.” The Trotskyists who split
from the CPGB tried from the 30s to the 50s every different form of possible
relationship to Labour, to try to win workers away from it or transform it in
some way.[20]
Meanwhile, Labour was growing into an establishment governing party of British
capitalism, particularly through the experience of the national unity
government in WWII.

The ’45 Labour
government was not a victory for socialism, but rather the state management of
capitalism, as we have been tracing from the Bonapartism of the 1860s. The
post-war order was not even really modelled on Keynesian and Fabian policy but
on America’s four freedoms, the Marshall plan and FDR’s New Deal. The essential
conservatism of the welfare state was revealed by the fact that it became the
consensus for the Conservative party, too, which managed the welfare state throughout
the 1950s.

When Labour lost the
1959 election, the party went into crisis, and the SPGB, a tiny split from the
old SDF, observed: “When the pioneers of
the Labour Party dreamed of placing themselves at the head of a grateful army
of electors by enacting social reforms, they never thought of a possibility of
a Tory Party that beat them at the same game.”[21]

Young Socialists

This crisis for Labourism was expressed through so-called left-wing
discontents within the party. A great battle took place at its 1960 Scarborough
conference between the “Left” and “Right” of the party over Clause IV and
nuclear disarmament. The Left won the battle but lost the war. At the same
time, official Communism had come into a crisis of its own following the Soviet
invasion of Hungary in ’56 and Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin.

This simultaneous
crisis of Stalinism and Labourism opened up possibilities for rethinking on the
Left, giving rise in the UK to what we now call the New Left. New Left
Review was launched in January 1960 as a direct response to Labour’s
defeat, featuring Ralph Miliband’s article “The Sickness of Labourism.”[22]
It is significant that Miliband opened the essay with a quote from Disraeli in
conversation with Henry Hyndman. When Hyndman visited him to ask for advice on
how to start a mass Socialist party, Disraeli responded, “It is a very
difficult country to move, Mr. Hyndman, very difficult indeed.” Miliband’s
“Sickness of Labourism” invoked the difficult problem of beginning an
independent socialist party. But perhaps the deep history he invoked was
illegible to his readers.

The Trotskyists of Labour
Review tried to engage in the new intellectual climate for rethinking Marxism.
Their 1960 issue on the famous Scarborough conference features Cliff Slaughter’s
valuable essay “What is Revolutionary Leadership?” Early issues also had
interesting debates between Slaughter and Alasdair MacIntyre (later of the IS)
over the question of the “New Left.” The period from Labour’s defeat in 1959 to
its election victory in 1964 was one of the most vibrant and thoughtful on the British
Left since the 1920s. Was there a possibility for overcoming the “symbiotic”
relationship between Left and Right within Labour? Was there a chance to
“transform” Labour? What would that have meant? Was there the possibility for
breaking from Labourism and founding a new independent socialist politics?

The Labour Party
itself was worried after so many defeats. It needed to attract some of the
youthful energy it could see protesting for the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND) at its conference. It needed to use the symbiotic
relationship between Left and Right to perpetuate itself. It decided to set up
a youth organization called Young Socialists (YS).

YS grew rapidly with
support from young people who had only ever known Conservative rule and found
the welfare state to be conformist and restrictive and who opposed nuclear
weapons and American foreign policy. The different Trotskyist groups all
entered, too, and tried to build their organizations by gaining influence in
the Labour Party through YS. [23]
More broadly, YS tried to “transform” Labour. There was a vibrant social scene,
and the YS papers ran column after column on the radical culture of the
swinging 60s (this was mocked at the time as “sex, syncopation and socialism”).
They demanded that Labour endorse unilateral disarmament and withdrawal
from NATO. As Young Guard, the minority paper in YS, wrote in 1963:

“It is vital that the voice of socialism is heard at this conference. We must demand full discussion of the important issues of wages and nationalisation and press home the socialist answers in the interests of Labour and of the working masses who are now looking to Labour for a lead.”[24]

Through the early
60s, this put a growing YS, with hundreds of national branches, at odds with
the Labour leadership, compounding a “Left/Right” dynamic in the party.

When Labour ran in
the 1964 election under Harold Wilson, it was seen as the chance of a lifetime
for these “young socialists.” Wilson and his ally Barbara Castle both came from
the Bevanite Left wing of the Labour party, which had opposed the party’s
rightward shift in the 50s under Gaitskell. The Tories had been in power for 13
years and were engulfed in scandals following the Suez war. A young Tony Benn,
fresh from a career at the BBC, led Labour’s new-fangled television campaign
with all the latest media-savvy ideas. Wilson spoke about how Labour was going
to harness the new technological revolution.

For most YS members,
as the election approached, it began to matter less and less that Labour was
not going to endorse nuclear disarmament, nor withdraw from NATO or complete
the set of nationalizations or the wages policy they had wanted. Rather, they
were drawn into the idea that getting rid of the Tories would be the best
chance in their lifetimes to vaguely advance socialism. “After the election,”
they thought, “we will push on from there. The working classes,” who, as Young
Guard had put it, were looking to Labour for a lead, “would probably become
emboldened and demand more.” These and other illusions helped them to
wholeheartedly endorse Harold Wilson’s Labour Party in 1964 and celebrate its
victory. The small window of opportunity for rethinking the necessity of
socialism, the problem of working-class political independence, the tradition
of Marxism and the relation of the Left to the Labour party had closed on this New
Left.

While most Young
Socialists went along with the course of the Wilson Government, a minority
voiced dissent. What is more colloquially considered the New Left is what came
after ’64: the young socialists who were discontented with the realities of the
Labour government. But despite the organizations they set up outside Labour in
the 70s (a long story I can’t get into here), they all still tacitly supported
Labour as Thatcher’s revolution rocked their world, and as mature adults they
probably voted for Tony Blair, who promised the same relief from years of Tory
government to another generation.

This dynamic was a consistent feature of the talks at a panel on “50 Years of 1968”[25] at the Platypus European conference in London in February 2018. Nearly all of the panelists spoke about disappointment with the Labour government of the mid 60s in the attempt to push them towards Left-wing politics. Judith Shapiro, a one-time member of the Sparticist League, recalled with horror, word for word, the news statement that Labour was giving tacit support to the U.S. troops in Vietnam. Despite her revolutionary Trotskyism, her real leftism manifested itself as disappointment with Labour: feeling betrayed. Benn comes to seem like disgruntled Wilsonites, and Wilson, disgruntled Bevanites. The Left goes on prosecuting the “symbiotic relationship” within Labour eternally.

The neoliberal Left

“The British general election of 1997 brought an ignominious end to eighteen years of Conservative rule. In its hour of victory, New Labour should recall how exacting modern electorates are prone to be. Despite its extraordinary caution, New Labour still managed to promise the beginnings of a badly needed democratic overhaul of the UK state, to claim that it stood ‘for the many not the few’, and to convey the impression that education and health would flourish under its stewardship. Robin Blackburn argues that the half-measures promised by the new government are likely to whet the appetite for democratic reform and that, in economic and social policy, Labour will be driven either to disappoint its electorate or to invent new ways of mobilizing and directing the economy. He concludes that only a bold European ‘New Deal,’ and a willingness to work against the grain of economic ‘globalization’, can now overcome the great damage and division bequeathed by Conservative rule.”[26]

The quotation above is from the editorial intro to New Left Review
after Blair’s victory in 1997. Sound familiar? It could have been written by
the Left today.

Much of Corbynism can
be chalked up to disgruntled Blairites. Blair had been their savior from the Tories
and then betrayed them with the Iraq War. Corbyn, as then-chair of the Stop the
War Coalition, represented the redemption of this sin by Labour, so that it could
come to terms with itself, and all those activists who left in 2003 could come
back. Corbyn is not really the “Old Labour” social democrat that Tony Benn was
(and Benn himself was no Bevan). Unlike Benn, who was formed in the 50s and
60s, Corbyn is really a political product of the 80s and 90s, the neoliberal
era, albeit through opposition.

So much of Corbyn’s
sensibility about politics is reminiscent of Blair — even to the point of literally
repeating Blair’s slogan, “For the many, not the few.” Corbyn has back-pedalled
on his former opposition to nuclear weapons and NATO, betraying his so-called Left-wing
foreign policy. He has replaced it in the 2019 election manifesto with the
promise to launch an “inquiry” into the legacies of British colonialism. Such
gestural politics were familiar to Blair, who “recognized” Britain’s role in
the Irish potato famine and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Corbyn’s move is a
sop to his Millennial base, who have been brought up on such neoliberal
gestural politics and plays to the PC identity politics they’ve learned at
university. Such policies will play well with Corbynistas, but they will not
attract back Labour’s former working-class voters, who do not have time for
middle-class guilt and symbolism.

Corbyn’s most
spectacular capitulation to the Blairites, whom he was supposed to defeat, was
conceding to their demand for a second referendum on Brexit. This will not go
down well in Labour’s so-called working-class heartlands either. The Left’s
attempts to explain away working-class Tory voters with charges of racism or
media bias recall the Democrats’ hysterical condemnation of Trump voters as “deplorables”
and invocation of conspiratorial Russian meddling. Such explanations signal
intellectual exhaustion and the end of the road.

Whether Corbyn loses this election to Boris Johnson, as most predict, or is able to muster a minority government with support from the Scottish National Party (SNP), it is clear that the Left will try to avoid its history in relation to the Labour party, and even more so the history of Marxism, in order to go on voting Labour, with or without misgivings. Elections have a weird generational impact, leaving people blinded to thinking critically about how capitalism is changing. We need to work against that tendency, to take a longer view and think critically. | P

[8]
From Fisher’s talk “All of this is temporary” at the CCI Collective.

[9] “Class
War in the Labour Party," Workers Hammer 233 (Winter 2015–16), available
online at: <https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/233/Labour.html>. Ultimately,
they abandoned support for Corbyn after he revealed himself to be an “EU
running dog.”

The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in December 2006, organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.